“Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes" Goethe. “Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.” Herbert Spencer. "My 80% friend isn't my 20% enemy" Ronald Reagan.
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Friday 31 December 2021
Thursday 30 December 2021
I’m a climate scientist. Don’t Look Up captures the madness I see every day
A film about a comet hurtling towards Earth and no one is doing anything about it? Sounds exactly like the climate crisis writes Peter Kalmus in The Guardian
‘
The movie Don’t Look Up is satire. But speaking as a climate scientist doing everything I can to wake people up and avoid planetary destruction, it’s also the most accurate film about society’s terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I’ve seen.
The film, from director Adam McKay and writer David Sirota, tells the story of astronomy grad student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her PhD adviser, Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), who discover a comet – a “planet killer” – that will impact the Earth in just over six months. The certainty of impact is 99.7%, as certain as just about anything in science.
The scientists are essentially alone with this knowledge, ignored and gaslighted by society. The panic and desperation they feel mirror the panic and desperation that many climate scientists feel. In one scene, Mindy hyperventilates in a bathroom; in another, Diabasky, on national TV, screams “Are we not being clear? We’re all 100% for sure gonna fucking die!” I can relate. This is what it feels like to be a climate scientist today.
The two astronomers are given a 20-minute audience with the president (Meryl Streep), who is glad to hear that impact isn’t technically 100% certain. Weighing election strategy above the fate of the planet, she decides to “sit tight and assess”. Desperate, the scientists then go on a national morning show, but the TV hosts make light of their warning (which is also overshadowed by a celebrity breakup story).
By now, the imminent collision with comet Diabasky is confirmed by scientists around the world. After political winds shift, the president initiates a mission to divert the comet, but changes her mind at the last moment when urged to do so by a billionaire donor (Mark Rylance) with his own plan to guide it to a safe landing, using unproven technology, in order to claim its precious metals. A sports magazine’s cover asks, “The end is near. Will there be a Super Bowl?”
But this isn’t a film about how humanity would respond to a planet-killing comet; it’s a film about how humanity is responding to planet-killing climate breakdown. We live in a society in which, despite extraordinarily clear, present, and worsening climate danger, more than half of Republican members of Congress still say climate change is a hoax and many more wish to block action, and in which the official Democratic party platform still enshrines massive subsidies to the fossil fuel industry; in which the current president ran on a promise that “nothing will fundamentally change”, and the speaker of the House dismissed even a modest climate plan as “the green dream or whatever”; in which the largest delegation to Cop26 was the fossil fuel industry, and the White House sold drilling rights to a huge tract of the Gulf of Mexico after the summit; in which world leaders say that climate is an “existential threat to humanity” while simultaneously expanding fossil fuel production; in which major newspapers still run fossil fuel ads, and climate news is routinely overshadowed by sports; in which entrepreneurs push incredibly risky tech solutions and billionaires sell the absurdist fantasy that humanity can just move to Mars.
After 15 years of working to raise climate urgency, I’ve concluded that the public in general, and world leaders in particular, underestimate how rapid, serious and permanent climate and ecological breakdown will be if humanity fails to mobilize. There may only be five years left before humanity expends the remaining “carbon budget” to stay under 1.5C of global heating at today’s emissions rates – a level of heating I am not confident will be compatible with civilization as we know it. And there may only be five years before the Amazon rainforest and a large Antarctic ice sheet pass irreversible tipping points.
The Earth system is breaking down now with breathtaking speed. And climate scientists have faced an even more insurmountable public communication task than the astronomers in Don’t Look Up, since climate destruction unfolds over decades – lightning fast as far as the planet is concerned, but glacially slow as far as the news cycle is concerned – and isn’t as immediate and visible as a comet in the sky.
Given all this, dismissing Don’t Look Up as too obvious might say more about the critic than the film. It’s funny and terrifying because it conveys a certain cold truth that climate scientists and others who understand the full depth of the climate emergency are living every day. I hope that this movie, which comically depicts how hard it is to break through prevailing norms, actually helps break through those norms in real life.
We need stories that highlight the many absurdities that arise from knowing what’s coming while failing to act.
I also hope Hollywood is learning how to tell climate stories that matter. Instead of stories that create comforting distance from the grave danger we are in via unrealistic techno fixes for unrealistic disaster scenarios, humanity needs stories that highlight the many absurdities that arise from collectively knowing what’s coming while collectively failing to act.
We also need stories that show humanity responding rationally to the crisis. A lack of technology isn’t what’s blocking action. Instead, humanity needs to confront the fossil fuel industry head on, accept that we need to consume less energy, and switch into full-on emergency mode. The sense of solidarity and relief we’d feel once this happens – if it happens – would be gamechanging for our species. More and better facts will not catalyze this sociocultural tipping point, but more and better stories might.
‘
The movie Don’t Look Up is satire. But speaking as a climate scientist doing everything I can to wake people up and avoid planetary destruction, it’s also the most accurate film about society’s terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I’ve seen.
The film, from director Adam McKay and writer David Sirota, tells the story of astronomy grad student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her PhD adviser, Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), who discover a comet – a “planet killer” – that will impact the Earth in just over six months. The certainty of impact is 99.7%, as certain as just about anything in science.
The scientists are essentially alone with this knowledge, ignored and gaslighted by society. The panic and desperation they feel mirror the panic and desperation that many climate scientists feel. In one scene, Mindy hyperventilates in a bathroom; in another, Diabasky, on national TV, screams “Are we not being clear? We’re all 100% for sure gonna fucking die!” I can relate. This is what it feels like to be a climate scientist today.
The two astronomers are given a 20-minute audience with the president (Meryl Streep), who is glad to hear that impact isn’t technically 100% certain. Weighing election strategy above the fate of the planet, she decides to “sit tight and assess”. Desperate, the scientists then go on a national morning show, but the TV hosts make light of their warning (which is also overshadowed by a celebrity breakup story).
By now, the imminent collision with comet Diabasky is confirmed by scientists around the world. After political winds shift, the president initiates a mission to divert the comet, but changes her mind at the last moment when urged to do so by a billionaire donor (Mark Rylance) with his own plan to guide it to a safe landing, using unproven technology, in order to claim its precious metals. A sports magazine’s cover asks, “The end is near. Will there be a Super Bowl?”
But this isn’t a film about how humanity would respond to a planet-killing comet; it’s a film about how humanity is responding to planet-killing climate breakdown. We live in a society in which, despite extraordinarily clear, present, and worsening climate danger, more than half of Republican members of Congress still say climate change is a hoax and many more wish to block action, and in which the official Democratic party platform still enshrines massive subsidies to the fossil fuel industry; in which the current president ran on a promise that “nothing will fundamentally change”, and the speaker of the House dismissed even a modest climate plan as “the green dream or whatever”; in which the largest delegation to Cop26 was the fossil fuel industry, and the White House sold drilling rights to a huge tract of the Gulf of Mexico after the summit; in which world leaders say that climate is an “existential threat to humanity” while simultaneously expanding fossil fuel production; in which major newspapers still run fossil fuel ads, and climate news is routinely overshadowed by sports; in which entrepreneurs push incredibly risky tech solutions and billionaires sell the absurdist fantasy that humanity can just move to Mars.
After 15 years of working to raise climate urgency, I’ve concluded that the public in general, and world leaders in particular, underestimate how rapid, serious and permanent climate and ecological breakdown will be if humanity fails to mobilize. There may only be five years left before humanity expends the remaining “carbon budget” to stay under 1.5C of global heating at today’s emissions rates – a level of heating I am not confident will be compatible with civilization as we know it. And there may only be five years before the Amazon rainforest and a large Antarctic ice sheet pass irreversible tipping points.
The Earth system is breaking down now with breathtaking speed. And climate scientists have faced an even more insurmountable public communication task than the astronomers in Don’t Look Up, since climate destruction unfolds over decades – lightning fast as far as the planet is concerned, but glacially slow as far as the news cycle is concerned – and isn’t as immediate and visible as a comet in the sky.
Given all this, dismissing Don’t Look Up as too obvious might say more about the critic than the film. It’s funny and terrifying because it conveys a certain cold truth that climate scientists and others who understand the full depth of the climate emergency are living every day. I hope that this movie, which comically depicts how hard it is to break through prevailing norms, actually helps break through those norms in real life.
We need stories that highlight the many absurdities that arise from knowing what’s coming while failing to act.
I also hope Hollywood is learning how to tell climate stories that matter. Instead of stories that create comforting distance from the grave danger we are in via unrealistic techno fixes for unrealistic disaster scenarios, humanity needs stories that highlight the many absurdities that arise from collectively knowing what’s coming while collectively failing to act.
We also need stories that show humanity responding rationally to the crisis. A lack of technology isn’t what’s blocking action. Instead, humanity needs to confront the fossil fuel industry head on, accept that we need to consume less energy, and switch into full-on emergency mode. The sense of solidarity and relief we’d feel once this happens – if it happens – would be gamechanging for our species. More and better facts will not catalyze this sociocultural tipping point, but more and better stories might.
Wednesday 29 December 2021
Ashes long-con exposed: England's dereliction of Test cricket threatens format as a whole
If the public loses confidence in the product, then its viability will be called into question Andrew Miller in Cricinfo
As anyone who lived through the 2008 credit crunch will remember, economies are essentially built on confidence. So long as the public has faith in the robustness of the institutions charged with managing their assets, those assets barely need to exist beyond a few 0s and 1s in a digital mainframe for them to be real and lasting indicators of a nation's wealth.
When doubts begin to beset the system, however, it's amazing how quickly the rot can take hold. Is this really a Triple-A-rated bond I am holding in my hands, or is it actually a tranche of sub-prime mortgages that are barely fit to line the gerbil cage?
Likewise, is this really the world's most enduring expression of sporting rivalry taking place in Australia right now, or is it a pointless turkey shoot that exists only to justify the exorbitant sums that TV broadcasters are willing to cough up for the privilege of hosting it… a privilege that, in itself, feeds into the self-same creation myth that keeps the hype ever hyping, and the bubble ever ballooning.
On Tuesday, that bubble finally burst. After weeks of barely suppressed panic behind the scenes, England's capitulation in Melbourne deserves to be Test cricket's very own Lehman Brothers moment - the final, full-frontal collapse of an institution so ancient, and previously presumed to be so inviolable, that it may require unprecedented emergency measures to prevent the entire sport from tanking.
For there really has never been an Ashes campaign quite as pathetic as this one. Crushing defeats have been plentiful in the sport's long and storied history - particularly in the recent past, with England having now lost 18 of their last 23 Tests Down Under, including 12 of the last 13. But never before has an England team taken the field in Australia with so little hope, such few expectations, so few remaining skills with which to retain control of their own destinies.
Nothing expressed the gulf better than the performance of Australia's Player of the Match, Scott Boland. Leaving aside the rightful celebration of his Indigenous heritage, of far greater pertinence was his international oven-readiness, at the age of 32, after a lifetime of toil for Victoria in the Sheffield Shield. Like Michael Neser, 31 on debut at Adelaide last week and a Test wicket-taker with his second ball in the format, Boland arrived on the stage every bit as ready for combat as England's Test batters used to be - most particularly the unit that won the Ashes in Australia in 2010-11, which included four players with a century on debut (Alastair Cook, Andrew Strauss, Jonathan Trott and Matt Prior) and two more (Kevin Pietersen and Ian Bell) with fifties.
The contrast with England's current crop of ciphers could not be more galling. It is genuinely impossible to see how Haseeb Hameed could have been expected to offer more than his tally of seven runs from 41 balls across two innings at the MCG, while Ollie Pope's Bradman-esque average of 99.94 at his home ground at The Oval, compared to his cat-on-hot-tin-roof displays at Brisbane and Adelaide, is the most visceral evidence possible of a domestic first-class system that is failing the next generation.
Even on the second day at the MCG, England's best day of the series had finished with them four down for 31, still 51 runs in arrears, as Australia's quicks punished their opponents for a fleeting moment of mid-afternoon hubris by unleashing an hour of God-complex thunderbolts. It stood to reason that the morning's follow-up would be similarly swift and pitiless.
Watching a bowed and beaten troop of England cricketers suck up Australian outfield celebrations is nothing new, of course. But this is different to previous Ashes hammerings, because despite the Covid restrictions and limited preparation time, never before has a series loss felt further removed from the sorts of caveats that sustained previous such debacles Down Under - most particularly the 2006-07 and 2013-14 whitewashes, both of which were at least the gory dismemberments of England teams that had previously swept all before them.
The 2021-22 team, by contrast, has swept nothing before it, except a few uncomfortable home ruths under a succession of carpets. Despite the enduring magnificence of James Anderson - whose unvanquished defiance evokes Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh's noble upholding of West Indies' crumbling standards at the turn of the millennium - and despite Joe Root willing himself to produce a year of such cursed brilliance it deserves to be inducted into Greek mythology, the rabble that clings to their coat-tails is little more than the zombified remains of the side that surrendered the urn so vapidly back in 2017-18.
They travelled to Australia with the same captain, for the first time on an Ashes tour in more than 100 years (and Root is destined for the same 5-0 shellacking that JWHT Douglas achieved in 1920-21); the same core bowling unit of right-arm medium-pacers, and by this third Test, the same outgunned middle order, with Root, Dawid Malan and Jonny Bairstow on this occasion physically united with Ben Stokes, compared to the spectre at the feast that had haunted the team's endeavours four years ago.
Nothing in the interim has progressed for this generation of players, in spite of a vast amount of hot air about how exhaustive the planning for this campaign has been - most particularly from England's dead-man-walking head coach, Chris Silverwood, whose epitaph deserves to be the same fateful phrase that he used to announce England's Test squad to face New Zealand at the start of the summer.
"The summer of Test cricket will be fascinating," Silverwood wrote back in May, shortly after he had taken over selection duties from Ed Smith to become the single most powerful supremo in the team's history. "Playing the top two teams in the world, in New Zealand and India, is perfect preparation for us as we continue to improve and progress towards an Ashes series in Australia at the back end of the year." Well, that aged well, didn't it?
And yet, Silverwood is just another symptom of English cricket's wider malaise. From the outset, and irrespective of his theoretical influence, he was only ever an uninspiring over-promotion from within the team's existing ranks - more than anything, a recognition of how undesirable the role of England head coach has become in recent years.
"All attempts to keep English Test cricket viable essentially ground to a halt from the moment that Tom Harrison was appointed as ECB CEO in 2015"
In an era of gig-economy opportunities on the T20 franchise circuit - when barely a day goes by without Andy Flower, the architect of England's last truly great Test team, being announced as Tashkent Tigers' batting consultant in the Uzbekistan Premier League - who wants or needs the 300-hotel-nights-a-year commitment required to oversee a side that, like an overworked troupe of stadium-rock dinosaurs, fears that the moment it takes a break from endless touring, everyone will forget they ever existed in the first place?
English cricket's financial reliance on its Test team has been holding the sport in this country back for generations, long before the complications of Covid kicked in to make the team's relentless touring lifestyle even less palatable than ever before. It was a point that Tom Harrison, the ECB chief executive, acknowledged in a moment of guard-down candour before last summer's series against India - and one that he will now be obliged to revisit with grave urgency as the sport lurches into a new crisis of confidence, but one that is effectively the reverse side of the same coin that the sport has been flipping all year long. English cricket's ongoing racism crisis, after all, is yet another damning expression of the sport's inability to move with the times.
"It is the most important series, then we've got another 'most important series' coming up, and then another directly after that," Harrison said of that India campaign - which, lest we forget, also needs to be completed next summer for the financial good of the game, even if the players would sooner move on and forget. "The reality is, for international players, is that the conveyor belt just keeps going. You want players turning up in these 'most important series' feeling fantastic about the opportunity of playing for their country. They are not going to be able to achieve that if they have forgotten the reasons why they play."
The issue for Harrison's enduring credibility, however, is that all attempts to keep English Test cricket viable essentially ground to a halt from the moment that he was appointed as CEO in 2015.
That summer's team still had the latent talent to seal the last of their four Ashes victories in five campaigns, but on Harrison's watch, the ECB has essentially spent the past six years preparing the life-rafts for the sport's post-international future - most notably through the establishment of the Hundred, but also through the full-bore focus on winning the 2019 World Cup, precisely because it was the sort of whiteboard-friendly "deliverable" that sits well on a list of boardroom KPIs… unlike the lumpen, intangible mesh of contexts by which success in Test cricket will always need to be measured.
It was a point that Root alluded to his shellshocked post-match comments, where he hinted that the red-ball game needed a "reset" to match the remarkable rise of the white-ball side from the wreckage of that winter's World Cup. But what do England honestly believe can be reset from this point of the sport's degradation?
It feels as though we've all been complicit in the long-con here. For 16 years and counting, the Ashes has been sold as the most glorious expression of cricket's noble traditions, when in fact that self-same biennial obsession has been complicit in shrinking the format's ambitions to the point where even England's head coach thinks that a magnificent home-summer schedule is nothing but a warm-up act.
Perhaps it all stems from the reductive ambitions of that never-to-be-forgotten 2005 series, the series upon which most of the modern myth is founded, but which was more of an end than a beginning where English cricket was concerned.
The summer of 2005 marked the end of free-to-air TV in the UK, the end of Richie Benaud as English cricket's voice of ages, the end of 18 years of Stockholm Syndrome-style subjugation by one of the greatest Test teams ever compiled. If English sport was to be repurposed as a series of nostalgic sighs for long-ago glories, then perhaps only Manchester United's "Solskjær has won it" moment can top it.
Sixteen years later, what are we left with? The dreadfulness of the modern Ashes experience has even bled into this winter's TV coverage, every bit as hamstrung by greedy decisions taken way above the pay-grade of the troops on the ground. It's symptomatic of a format whose true essence has been asset-stripped since the rivalry's heyday two decades ago, with those individual assets being sold back to the paying public at a premium in the interim.
It's not unlike a Ponzi scheme, in fact - a concept that English cricket became unexpectedly familiar with during a Test match in Antigua back in 2009, when the revelations about the ECB's old chum, Allen Stanford, caused a run on his bank in St John's, with queues stretching way further down the road that any stampede to attend a Caribbean Test match of recent vintage.
The warnings about Test cricket's fragility have been legion for decades. But if England, of all the Test nations, doesn't remember to care for the format that, through the hype of the Ashes, it pretends to hold most dear, this winter's experiences have shown that the expertise required to shore up those standards may not be able to survive much more neglect.
As anyone who lived through the 2008 credit crunch will remember, economies are essentially built on confidence. So long as the public has faith in the robustness of the institutions charged with managing their assets, those assets barely need to exist beyond a few 0s and 1s in a digital mainframe for them to be real and lasting indicators of a nation's wealth.
When doubts begin to beset the system, however, it's amazing how quickly the rot can take hold. Is this really a Triple-A-rated bond I am holding in my hands, or is it actually a tranche of sub-prime mortgages that are barely fit to line the gerbil cage?
Likewise, is this really the world's most enduring expression of sporting rivalry taking place in Australia right now, or is it a pointless turkey shoot that exists only to justify the exorbitant sums that TV broadcasters are willing to cough up for the privilege of hosting it… a privilege that, in itself, feeds into the self-same creation myth that keeps the hype ever hyping, and the bubble ever ballooning.
On Tuesday, that bubble finally burst. After weeks of barely suppressed panic behind the scenes, England's capitulation in Melbourne deserves to be Test cricket's very own Lehman Brothers moment - the final, full-frontal collapse of an institution so ancient, and previously presumed to be so inviolable, that it may require unprecedented emergency measures to prevent the entire sport from tanking.
For there really has never been an Ashes campaign quite as pathetic as this one. Crushing defeats have been plentiful in the sport's long and storied history - particularly in the recent past, with England having now lost 18 of their last 23 Tests Down Under, including 12 of the last 13. But never before has an England team taken the field in Australia with so little hope, such few expectations, so few remaining skills with which to retain control of their own destinies.
Nothing expressed the gulf better than the performance of Australia's Player of the Match, Scott Boland. Leaving aside the rightful celebration of his Indigenous heritage, of far greater pertinence was his international oven-readiness, at the age of 32, after a lifetime of toil for Victoria in the Sheffield Shield. Like Michael Neser, 31 on debut at Adelaide last week and a Test wicket-taker with his second ball in the format, Boland arrived on the stage every bit as ready for combat as England's Test batters used to be - most particularly the unit that won the Ashes in Australia in 2010-11, which included four players with a century on debut (Alastair Cook, Andrew Strauss, Jonathan Trott and Matt Prior) and two more (Kevin Pietersen and Ian Bell) with fifties.
The contrast with England's current crop of ciphers could not be more galling. It is genuinely impossible to see how Haseeb Hameed could have been expected to offer more than his tally of seven runs from 41 balls across two innings at the MCG, while Ollie Pope's Bradman-esque average of 99.94 at his home ground at The Oval, compared to his cat-on-hot-tin-roof displays at Brisbane and Adelaide, is the most visceral evidence possible of a domestic first-class system that is failing the next generation.
Even on the second day at the MCG, England's best day of the series had finished with them four down for 31, still 51 runs in arrears, as Australia's quicks punished their opponents for a fleeting moment of mid-afternoon hubris by unleashing an hour of God-complex thunderbolts. It stood to reason that the morning's follow-up would be similarly swift and pitiless.
Watching a bowed and beaten troop of England cricketers suck up Australian outfield celebrations is nothing new, of course. But this is different to previous Ashes hammerings, because despite the Covid restrictions and limited preparation time, never before has a series loss felt further removed from the sorts of caveats that sustained previous such debacles Down Under - most particularly the 2006-07 and 2013-14 whitewashes, both of which were at least the gory dismemberments of England teams that had previously swept all before them.
The 2021-22 team, by contrast, has swept nothing before it, except a few uncomfortable home ruths under a succession of carpets. Despite the enduring magnificence of James Anderson - whose unvanquished defiance evokes Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh's noble upholding of West Indies' crumbling standards at the turn of the millennium - and despite Joe Root willing himself to produce a year of such cursed brilliance it deserves to be inducted into Greek mythology, the rabble that clings to their coat-tails is little more than the zombified remains of the side that surrendered the urn so vapidly back in 2017-18.
They travelled to Australia with the same captain, for the first time on an Ashes tour in more than 100 years (and Root is destined for the same 5-0 shellacking that JWHT Douglas achieved in 1920-21); the same core bowling unit of right-arm medium-pacers, and by this third Test, the same outgunned middle order, with Root, Dawid Malan and Jonny Bairstow on this occasion physically united with Ben Stokes, compared to the spectre at the feast that had haunted the team's endeavours four years ago.
Nothing in the interim has progressed for this generation of players, in spite of a vast amount of hot air about how exhaustive the planning for this campaign has been - most particularly from England's dead-man-walking head coach, Chris Silverwood, whose epitaph deserves to be the same fateful phrase that he used to announce England's Test squad to face New Zealand at the start of the summer.
"The summer of Test cricket will be fascinating," Silverwood wrote back in May, shortly after he had taken over selection duties from Ed Smith to become the single most powerful supremo in the team's history. "Playing the top two teams in the world, in New Zealand and India, is perfect preparation for us as we continue to improve and progress towards an Ashes series in Australia at the back end of the year." Well, that aged well, didn't it?
And yet, Silverwood is just another symptom of English cricket's wider malaise. From the outset, and irrespective of his theoretical influence, he was only ever an uninspiring over-promotion from within the team's existing ranks - more than anything, a recognition of how undesirable the role of England head coach has become in recent years.
"All attempts to keep English Test cricket viable essentially ground to a halt from the moment that Tom Harrison was appointed as ECB CEO in 2015"
In an era of gig-economy opportunities on the T20 franchise circuit - when barely a day goes by without Andy Flower, the architect of England's last truly great Test team, being announced as Tashkent Tigers' batting consultant in the Uzbekistan Premier League - who wants or needs the 300-hotel-nights-a-year commitment required to oversee a side that, like an overworked troupe of stadium-rock dinosaurs, fears that the moment it takes a break from endless touring, everyone will forget they ever existed in the first place?
English cricket's financial reliance on its Test team has been holding the sport in this country back for generations, long before the complications of Covid kicked in to make the team's relentless touring lifestyle even less palatable than ever before. It was a point that Tom Harrison, the ECB chief executive, acknowledged in a moment of guard-down candour before last summer's series against India - and one that he will now be obliged to revisit with grave urgency as the sport lurches into a new crisis of confidence, but one that is effectively the reverse side of the same coin that the sport has been flipping all year long. English cricket's ongoing racism crisis, after all, is yet another damning expression of the sport's inability to move with the times.
"It is the most important series, then we've got another 'most important series' coming up, and then another directly after that," Harrison said of that India campaign - which, lest we forget, also needs to be completed next summer for the financial good of the game, even if the players would sooner move on and forget. "The reality is, for international players, is that the conveyor belt just keeps going. You want players turning up in these 'most important series' feeling fantastic about the opportunity of playing for their country. They are not going to be able to achieve that if they have forgotten the reasons why they play."
The issue for Harrison's enduring credibility, however, is that all attempts to keep English Test cricket viable essentially ground to a halt from the moment that he was appointed as CEO in 2015.
That summer's team still had the latent talent to seal the last of their four Ashes victories in five campaigns, but on Harrison's watch, the ECB has essentially spent the past six years preparing the life-rafts for the sport's post-international future - most notably through the establishment of the Hundred, but also through the full-bore focus on winning the 2019 World Cup, precisely because it was the sort of whiteboard-friendly "deliverable" that sits well on a list of boardroom KPIs… unlike the lumpen, intangible mesh of contexts by which success in Test cricket will always need to be measured.
It was a point that Root alluded to his shellshocked post-match comments, where he hinted that the red-ball game needed a "reset" to match the remarkable rise of the white-ball side from the wreckage of that winter's World Cup. But what do England honestly believe can be reset from this point of the sport's degradation?
It feels as though we've all been complicit in the long-con here. For 16 years and counting, the Ashes has been sold as the most glorious expression of cricket's noble traditions, when in fact that self-same biennial obsession has been complicit in shrinking the format's ambitions to the point where even England's head coach thinks that a magnificent home-summer schedule is nothing but a warm-up act.
Perhaps it all stems from the reductive ambitions of that never-to-be-forgotten 2005 series, the series upon which most of the modern myth is founded, but which was more of an end than a beginning where English cricket was concerned.
The summer of 2005 marked the end of free-to-air TV in the UK, the end of Richie Benaud as English cricket's voice of ages, the end of 18 years of Stockholm Syndrome-style subjugation by one of the greatest Test teams ever compiled. If English sport was to be repurposed as a series of nostalgic sighs for long-ago glories, then perhaps only Manchester United's "Solskjær has won it" moment can top it.
Sixteen years later, what are we left with? The dreadfulness of the modern Ashes experience has even bled into this winter's TV coverage, every bit as hamstrung by greedy decisions taken way above the pay-grade of the troops on the ground. It's symptomatic of a format whose true essence has been asset-stripped since the rivalry's heyday two decades ago, with those individual assets being sold back to the paying public at a premium in the interim.
It's not unlike a Ponzi scheme, in fact - a concept that English cricket became unexpectedly familiar with during a Test match in Antigua back in 2009, when the revelations about the ECB's old chum, Allen Stanford, caused a run on his bank in St John's, with queues stretching way further down the road that any stampede to attend a Caribbean Test match of recent vintage.
The warnings about Test cricket's fragility have been legion for decades. But if England, of all the Test nations, doesn't remember to care for the format that, through the hype of the Ashes, it pretends to hold most dear, this winter's experiences have shown that the expertise required to shore up those standards may not be able to survive much more neglect.
Saturday 25 December 2021
What is Modi-Shah BJP’s ideology? You’re wrong if you say Right wing, because it’s Hindu Left
Modi-Shah BJP government is Right only on religion and nationalism. The rest is as Left as the Congress or any other.writes SHEKHAR GUPTA in The Print
Prashant Kishor, who prefers to be described as a political aide rather than a strategist, which is generally the preferred usage for him, featured in our serious conversational show ‘Off The Cuff’ this week. Neelam Pandey, a senior member of our political reporting team at ThePrint, co-hosted it with me.
At some point, we asked him the question that’s always intrigued us. Does he have an ideology? Doesn’t that follow from the fact that he’s worked with Narendra Modi, Mamata Banerjee, Congress-SP (Uttar Pradesh, 2017), M.K. Stalin, Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, Amarinder Singh and more?
To our surprise, he said no, I am not ideology-agnostic, you can call me Left-of-Centre. And then went on to elaborate what he meant, by using Mahatma Gandhi’s example. And so on. I noticed later, incidentally, that Kishor’s Twitter bio begins with the words “Revere Gandhi…”
His claim to a Centre-Left ideology set us thinking. What if we asked any of the other key political leaders the same question today? What is your ideology? Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, Mamata Banerjee, Andhra’s Jagan, Tamil Nadu’s Stalin, Telangana’s KCR and so on. If any of them chooses to answer that question — the answer, honest or not, will be about the same. Everyone in Indian politics now wades in the waters of varying depth somewhere on the Left side of the pool. Nobody will say I stand on the Right.
Which brings us to the trick question. What would Narendra Modi’s answer be? We are, of course, making a brave and far-out presumption that he lets us or anyone ask him such a direct question: What’s your ideology, Prime Minister sir? Now, whether you are fan or a critic, chances are, your immediate response will be, of course the Right wing.
Over the past seven years since the Modi-Shah BJP has been in power, “Right wing” has become the widely accepted usage for the party, and the ideological forces behind it. We need to examine if this passes the test of facts. And fasten seat belts. Because, I will then make the case to you that what Modi and his BJP represent today is not a domineering national force of the Hindu Right. It is, on the other hand, the Hindu Left.
The Left-Right descriptors over time have become mixed up and confusing. In governance terms, the Right means first of all, social conservatism, strong religiosity, hard nationalism, low threshold for criticism, an authoritarian outlook. On all these parameters, the Modi government and today’s BJP pass the test of being Right wing. The reason I qualify it here is that we do not get caught in simplistic binaries. On all of these, this BJP and Modi are no different from, say, the Republicans in the US or the British Conservatives. Then, we enter contentious zones.
How do we, then come to our argument that the Modi-Shah-Yogi BJP is not a force of the pure Right or even the Hindu Right, but of the Hindu Left?
Check out the many steps the Modi government has taken on the economy in the past seven-plus years. For historical reference, look back at the previous BJP government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee. It made its commitment to getting the government out of business explicit, and set up a disinvestment ministry. When the party returned to power in 2014, you would have expected it to bring that ministry back. No such thing happened, although now there is a department, DIPAM, in the finance ministry with a full secretary.
It is only now that there is heady talk of disinvestment, but not so much has happened yet, with the sterling exception of Air India. Much other privatisation is still merely talk, or sleight of hand. As in, getting one public sector giant to acquire a smaller one, and the government, as the majority shareholder, cashing out to balance its deficit. But it is, as we had said in an earlier National Interest, like genius Milo Minderbender of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 trading with himself and making a profit. Of course, using the state’s products and cash.
Actually, this gets worse than a sleight of hand often enough. Think of the LIC, or even ONGC, being made to buy another PSU the government wants to ‘disinvest’ from. A bunch of money is paid out to the government. Our complaint isn’t that it disappears into that bottomless pit called the Consolidated Fund of India. If you believed in a market economy, you would have no complaint if the LIC or ONGC paid out dividends from its profits to its only, or overwhelming, shareholder, the government. But when the government makes them buy assets from it, these companies are not necessarily acting in the best interests of the policy holder or the minority shareholder. We are not saying that it always works out to their detriment, but the fact is these are not decisions these companies’ boards are taking with these non-sarkari shareholders’ interests at the top of their minds. This is a characteristic of the Left, not Right.
The Left is also known for handout economics, large, ambitious, welfare schemes involving redistribution of large chunks of the revenues. Which is precisely what the Modi government has been doing, from the MGNREGA it inherited to Gram Awas, toilet-building, Ujjwala, direct cash transfers to farmers and the poor, free grain and so on. Have you noticed, in fact, how muted as the opposition criticism of this governments’ Budgets has been?
There is some usual sniggering about being “pro-rich” etc. But everybody also notices that taxes on individuals now are the highest — almost 44 per cent — since reform began. Add to that an average of 18 per cent or so GST on goods and services that people, especially the rich, consume. The Left would applaud this. Of course, they’d want this to be even higher. Hopefully not the 97 per cent it was at Indira Gandhi’s socialist peak, when the foundation of the parallel black economy was laid.
An expanding, large, maai-baap (mom & dad) sarkar is something the Leftists love. See the expansion of our government in the Modi era. More and more Bhawans have come up in Delhi to accommodate a burgeoning government. Now the new Central Vista will create space for more. A comparison again with Vajpayee government. He had no hesitation selling the loss-making Lodhi Hotel in the heart of Delhi. An even bigger PSU dud was Hotel Janpath. Which, instead of being sold, has now become another set of offices and government accommodation. Samrat Hotel, next to Ashoka, ceased to be a hotel a long time ago. It has become a sarkari bhawan too. In fact, almost everyone here will be surprised when I tell you that even the new Lok Pal (do you remember we had appointed one? Okay, what’s his name?) has been given half a floor here.
Our taxes are higher than in a generation, our government is bigger than two generations and still growing, we ‘privatise’ our companies often by selling one PSU to another, now our government also decides for all of the country which Covid vaccine to have when, to be allowed boosters or not, and what can be sold in India. In a genuinely free market, there will be shops and buyers for Covaxin, Covishield, Sputnik, Pfizer and Moderna.
As with cars, consumers can choose a Maruti or a Mercedes. But not vaccines. Why? Because ours is a maai-baap sarkar. It is in no way a government of the economic Right. The Right is limited to religion and nationalism. The rest is as Left as the Congress or any other. The reason we call Modi-BJP ideology as the Hindu Left.
Prashant Kishor, who prefers to be described as a political aide rather than a strategist, which is generally the preferred usage for him, featured in our serious conversational show ‘Off The Cuff’ this week. Neelam Pandey, a senior member of our political reporting team at ThePrint, co-hosted it with me.
At some point, we asked him the question that’s always intrigued us. Does he have an ideology? Doesn’t that follow from the fact that he’s worked with Narendra Modi, Mamata Banerjee, Congress-SP (Uttar Pradesh, 2017), M.K. Stalin, Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, Amarinder Singh and more?
To our surprise, he said no, I am not ideology-agnostic, you can call me Left-of-Centre. And then went on to elaborate what he meant, by using Mahatma Gandhi’s example. And so on. I noticed later, incidentally, that Kishor’s Twitter bio begins with the words “Revere Gandhi…”
His claim to a Centre-Left ideology set us thinking. What if we asked any of the other key political leaders the same question today? What is your ideology? Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, Mamata Banerjee, Andhra’s Jagan, Tamil Nadu’s Stalin, Telangana’s KCR and so on. If any of them chooses to answer that question — the answer, honest or not, will be about the same. Everyone in Indian politics now wades in the waters of varying depth somewhere on the Left side of the pool. Nobody will say I stand on the Right.
Which brings us to the trick question. What would Narendra Modi’s answer be? We are, of course, making a brave and far-out presumption that he lets us or anyone ask him such a direct question: What’s your ideology, Prime Minister sir? Now, whether you are fan or a critic, chances are, your immediate response will be, of course the Right wing.
Over the past seven years since the Modi-Shah BJP has been in power, “Right wing” has become the widely accepted usage for the party, and the ideological forces behind it. We need to examine if this passes the test of facts. And fasten seat belts. Because, I will then make the case to you that what Modi and his BJP represent today is not a domineering national force of the Hindu Right. It is, on the other hand, the Hindu Left.
The Left-Right descriptors over time have become mixed up and confusing. In governance terms, the Right means first of all, social conservatism, strong religiosity, hard nationalism, low threshold for criticism, an authoritarian outlook. On all these parameters, the Modi government and today’s BJP pass the test of being Right wing. The reason I qualify it here is that we do not get caught in simplistic binaries. On all of these, this BJP and Modi are no different from, say, the Republicans in the US or the British Conservatives. Then, we enter contentious zones.
How do we, then come to our argument that the Modi-Shah-Yogi BJP is not a force of the pure Right or even the Hindu Right, but of the Hindu Left?
Check out the many steps the Modi government has taken on the economy in the past seven-plus years. For historical reference, look back at the previous BJP government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee. It made its commitment to getting the government out of business explicit, and set up a disinvestment ministry. When the party returned to power in 2014, you would have expected it to bring that ministry back. No such thing happened, although now there is a department, DIPAM, in the finance ministry with a full secretary.
It is only now that there is heady talk of disinvestment, but not so much has happened yet, with the sterling exception of Air India. Much other privatisation is still merely talk, or sleight of hand. As in, getting one public sector giant to acquire a smaller one, and the government, as the majority shareholder, cashing out to balance its deficit. But it is, as we had said in an earlier National Interest, like genius Milo Minderbender of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 trading with himself and making a profit. Of course, using the state’s products and cash.
Actually, this gets worse than a sleight of hand often enough. Think of the LIC, or even ONGC, being made to buy another PSU the government wants to ‘disinvest’ from. A bunch of money is paid out to the government. Our complaint isn’t that it disappears into that bottomless pit called the Consolidated Fund of India. If you believed in a market economy, you would have no complaint if the LIC or ONGC paid out dividends from its profits to its only, or overwhelming, shareholder, the government. But when the government makes them buy assets from it, these companies are not necessarily acting in the best interests of the policy holder or the minority shareholder. We are not saying that it always works out to their detriment, but the fact is these are not decisions these companies’ boards are taking with these non-sarkari shareholders’ interests at the top of their minds. This is a characteristic of the Left, not Right.
The Left is also known for handout economics, large, ambitious, welfare schemes involving redistribution of large chunks of the revenues. Which is precisely what the Modi government has been doing, from the MGNREGA it inherited to Gram Awas, toilet-building, Ujjwala, direct cash transfers to farmers and the poor, free grain and so on. Have you noticed, in fact, how muted as the opposition criticism of this governments’ Budgets has been?
There is some usual sniggering about being “pro-rich” etc. But everybody also notices that taxes on individuals now are the highest — almost 44 per cent — since reform began. Add to that an average of 18 per cent or so GST on goods and services that people, especially the rich, consume. The Left would applaud this. Of course, they’d want this to be even higher. Hopefully not the 97 per cent it was at Indira Gandhi’s socialist peak, when the foundation of the parallel black economy was laid.
An expanding, large, maai-baap (mom & dad) sarkar is something the Leftists love. See the expansion of our government in the Modi era. More and more Bhawans have come up in Delhi to accommodate a burgeoning government. Now the new Central Vista will create space for more. A comparison again with Vajpayee government. He had no hesitation selling the loss-making Lodhi Hotel in the heart of Delhi. An even bigger PSU dud was Hotel Janpath. Which, instead of being sold, has now become another set of offices and government accommodation. Samrat Hotel, next to Ashoka, ceased to be a hotel a long time ago. It has become a sarkari bhawan too. In fact, almost everyone here will be surprised when I tell you that even the new Lok Pal (do you remember we had appointed one? Okay, what’s his name?) has been given half a floor here.
Our taxes are higher than in a generation, our government is bigger than two generations and still growing, we ‘privatise’ our companies often by selling one PSU to another, now our government also decides for all of the country which Covid vaccine to have when, to be allowed boosters or not, and what can be sold in India. In a genuinely free market, there will be shops and buyers for Covaxin, Covishield, Sputnik, Pfizer and Moderna.
As with cars, consumers can choose a Maruti or a Mercedes. But not vaccines. Why? Because ours is a maai-baap sarkar. It is in no way a government of the economic Right. The Right is limited to religion and nationalism. The rest is as Left as the Congress or any other. The reason we call Modi-BJP ideology as the Hindu Left.
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